


autoclave

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-25
Packaged: 2018-08-10 23:28:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7865647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How old are you, Shiro?” she asks him suddenly, her voice hoarse with done and gone tears. Shiro looks at her, confused, but obediently considers the question.</p><p>“I think it must have been my birthday at some point,” he says, frowning, the dip of his eyebrows and the edge of his jaw like a blade, “So. Twenty five? Twenty six? What date is it on Earth again?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	autoclave

Four days after Allura kills her father, Shiro finds her crying in the control room. She’s been there, in the stale and overpowering quiet, for some hours. She figured nobody would come to look for her, not this late, not with their human circadian rhythms luring their eyes to close.

“Princess,” he says, all military precision, not looking up from the tablet in his hand, flipping through the holographic battle sequences, “I’ve been considering the last reports and -”

She looks at him through sore eyes. She has no idea how she looks, but he stops, so that's an answer in and of itself.

“I’m -” he starts, then stops, then starts again. “I - it’s been a long day. I can go. I should go.”

His awkwardness makes him younger, makes him coltish. She almost smiles with it.

“How old are you, Shiro?” she asks him suddenly, her voice hoarse with done and gone tears. Shiro looks at her, confused, but obediently considers the question.

“I think it must have been my birthday at some point,” he says, frowning, the dip of his eyebrows and the edge of his jaw like a blade, “So. Twenty five? Twenty six? What date is it on Earth again?”

“I think it’s the tenth month of twelve,” Allura says, glancing to the program Pidge rigged into the console two months in. “About thirteen days?”

“October,” Shiro corrects absently, “so twenty six, I suppose,” and then, “Is it a Friday?”

“What?”

“It’s the thirteenth, right? Is it also a Friday?” Shiro rolls his eyes. “It’d explain why Lance was shrieking this morning. Apparently, Keith knocked into him and he dropped a mirror.”

“Nothing you’re saying is making any sense,” Allura tells him, and Shiro smiles. He looks tired, she thinks. He tucks the tablet under his arm and heads over towards her, leans over to check the date on the console. He smells faintly of something metallic, and he says, “Yep, it’s a Friday,” with some small kind of satisfaction.

Allura hates it when they all do this, because they all do this, when they remind her there is reams of space between them: constellations and biology, blood and history between her and the paladins her father told her Altea fell in hope of, languages and stories that she can never parse; that she is always separate, that she is always last. That they are all she has to stave off the loss of something great and terrible when for her, that loss has already happened.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says. When she looks at him, his mouth is unsettlingly self-deprecating; his eyes are dark with understanding; she feels sorrow leach from him in waves. Shiro and his bleeding heart eyes.

“How much of that,” she says, feeling increasingly horrified, “Did I say out loud?”

“Enough,” Shiro replies.

She lets out an undignified voice and covers her mouth with both her hands. Shiro laughs.

“I’m not like that,” she insists. _I’m not that ugly._

“Sure,” he says, raising his eyebrows.

“I’m not!”

She sounds so _childish_.

“Of course not,” Shiro says, “You’re not because you can’t be.” When she looks at him, he’s leaning against the console, his arms folded, the tablet carefully placed to the side. He’s not looking at her, and she can see the faint light of the console strike his face, can see he’s watching the stars. “People expect things of you,” he continues, very slowly, very evenly, “So you tell yourself you can’t. You can’t afford to lose face, not if they’re going to respect you. Not when they’re going to trust you with their lives. You have to be _consistent_.” 

He sounds half-mocking by the last part. She watches him not look at her, and says, “Yes. Yes, I see,” with the sense of something unravelling, something unspooling, gravity making it gain momentum.

“It’s unlucky,” he adds after a moment. “Friday the 13th. On Earth. It’s seen as unlucky.”

“Right.”

“If you break a mirror, you’re supposed to have seven years’ bad luck.”

“And Lance really believes that?”

“I don’t know.” Shiro shrugs. “I think he just enjoys the excuse to admit he’s stressed without having to admit he’s stressed. That, and it annoys Keith. So who knows what he actually buys into, you know?”

This is easy for them. This is talking shop. Shiro’s already relaxed a little, the line of his shoulders easing.

“Humans are not very logical,” Allura muses.

Shiro huffs out a laugh, unfolding his arms and glancing at her. The corners of his mouth tilt up.  

“No,” Shiro says, “We’re not. Did you only just notice, Princess?”

He sighs then.

“I used to think we were the pioneers of every bad idea going," he tells her. 

“But something proved you wrong?”

Shiro glances at her again, and her gaze falls to his arm. She remembers, and she flushes. 

“Yeah,” Shiro says, “Something did,” and goes back to looking at the stars. The moment stretches, slow and uncertain. 

“On Altea,” Allura tells him after a moment, struggling to think of the right thing to say, struggling to think of anything to say at all, only noticing that the tension in his shoulders is back again and hating it, “You’re supposed to hold a celebration every time a ship leaves. In case it doesn’t return. They say that way, the last memory of you is of you laughing.”

“That’s nice,” Shiro says politely, and then his gaze turns sharp as he realises what she’s telling him. “So, that party wasn’t for -”

“It was,” she corrects him, “But only in part.” Then she nudges his shoulder with hers, a brief flare of contact, and raises her eyebrows. “Your turn now.”

“Oh, we’re doing this?” he says, laughing, and she thinks: _there. Right there. Just like that. Can’t you see the point of it? Can’t you understand why people who loved you might want that?_

“We’re doing this," she decides firmly.   

She goes and sits right up next to the glass of the viewing platform, resting her chin on her knees. She hears, rather than sees, him follow, and settle sat next to her. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with hands, then settles for leaning back on them.

“ _Hatsu Tanjo_ ,” Shiro says, “It means ‘first birthday’ in Japanese.” His voice stumbles a little over the pronunciation and Allura imagines how rusty her Altean would be if not for Coran, if one day she might have lost it entirely. The thought makes her shiver. Shiro’s eyes are very faraway. “Your parents make you special red-and-white _mochi_ , it’s - uh, it’s a kind of sweet - and they put it on your back, they bundle it up and put it on your back. It’s very heavy, and then you carry it for a few steps, and then your parents - well, I guess they push you? To get you to stumble.”

“That’s awful!”

“No, it’s not like that - it’s - it’s a blessing? Your parents wish for happiness for you, for the rest of your life, for _enman_ \- which is, there's not really a way to translate it properly, but it's good. It's the good in life. It's life being good, and being enough. And - the push, it’s so you know it’s okay to fall down. It’s because that’s what happens sometimes.”

“Did your parents do that for you?” Allura asks, and Shiro nods.

Sometimes, Allura forgets the paladins all had lives back on their home planet, with traditions, daydreams, mistakes; all the things that constitute living. Sometimes, Allura forgets that for all their difference, they are not as alien as they seem.

“Yes, I think so. Obviously, I don’t remember. I was only a baby. My aunt raised me after they died, so she was the one who was with me for my Coming of Age day but - I like to think my parents wanted the best for me.”

 _My aunt raised me after they died._ He says it so casually. He says it like an old wound. 

“Do you get used to it?” she blurts out suddenly. She doesn’t have to clarify what she’s asking.

“You get used to living with it,” he replies, which is honest without being unkind, which is Shiro’s speciality.

“I think I can do that,” she says.

“I think you can too.”

“You do?” 

Admitting doubt in front of her paladins, admitting self-doubt: Allura is half the Altean she should be, but she herself is only half of the whole Altean civilisation. 

“Princess,” Shiro says, looking at her, his sweetheart smile lopsided, his bleeding heart eyes, “I think you could do anything you needed to, anything you wanted to. I think you could do everything.”

He says it so naturally. 

He gets up in the wake of her silence, rolls a crick out of his neck, and heads towards the door. She watches him go without speaking, stunned, her mouth heavy with a thousand words.

“Thank you, Paladin,” she says instead of any of them, and winces at herself.

Shiro turns back, gives her an almost-lazy salute, and smiles again. He smiles exactly like dawn on her homeworld felt. She doesn’t know what to call this rising feeling; except she does, except she doesn’t. _So you tell yourself you can’t. You have to be consistent._

“Anytime, Princess,” he says.

She turns back to the stars and keeps vigil all night.


End file.
